Lots and lots of neat

recommended: marci nelligan

We should all trust Katie Ford's editing implicitly. I mean, she edited me into a previous issue of New Orleans Review. More importantly, she also edited Endi Bogue Hartigan into one of last year's issues. A fact I am continually grateful for (subsequently Hartigan's One Sun Storm was published last fall by the Center for Literary Publishing).

In this issue (34.2), she includes a selection from Marci Nelligan, and I have to say, "Trust Katie Ford!" Nelligen's movement is soft and sturdy like water. Like kind insistence. How these poems quote from the Old Testament and Darwin's On the Origin of Species, I have no idea. The bio note claims this is the case, but I can hear just bare hints of the two texts in this selection from Infinite Variations. What I mainly hear is an argument about identity and evolution, about internal dischord.

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recommended: desmond kon zhicheng-mingde

Who could not love the long line made inexhaustible. Yes, many poets accomplish this but these new poems I'm seeing from Desmond kon Zhicheng-Mingde are so rich, and expansive, and sensually declarative, I can't keep myself from loving them. The poems I helped to edit into Gulf Coast responded to quotes from the Bagivad-Gita, and these are from a Latin liturgy? I'm not sure the exact source, but the movement is extra lyrical, like the extra you get from the ever increasing Big Gulp size at 7-11.

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recommended: jennifer whitaker

I know it's only natural to incline towards poems that are exploring a familiar subject. In the current issue of New Orleans Review (34.2), Whitaker has a poem about fathers. And I know for me it's almost like a poem about my mother. It's how a parent continues to wield power over a child. All poetic images should have the complicated anatomy this power has, and will always have.

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recommended: kaethe schwehn

I stand behind "Missive," one of Kaethe Schwehn's poems in the newest issue of New Orleans Review (34.2). I stand behind it because political poems can live and breathe a humanity, even while they take a rhetorical stance. The poem has a soldier left standing after a battle, who is asking instructions for lifting his fallen comrades and arranging them so they make one more gesture of war. Even in death, it seems, they won't be relieved of their service.

I am also interested in how "Missive" interacts with another of the poems Schwehn has in the magazine, "The Color of Carbon"--a poem heavy on language play, and consonant C sounds possibly describing the color of carbon. I like how "Missive" can literally be about a soldier left standing after a battle, AND it can resemble the methods of language. Words should be propped up on trees, like dead soldiers legs. They should make hard and soft C sounds on the wind.

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